When a Man's Single. By J. H. Barrie. (Hodder and
Stoughton.)—In point of humour, this novel, by the author of "Auld Licht Idylls," is very much above the average of fiction ; but as a work of art and heart, it does not reach the level of that, in many respects, admirable book. The best scenes —the first and the last—are laid in the same Thrums that figures in the "Idylls." There are both humour and pathos in Mr. Barrie's account of how his hero, Bob Angus, the young saw-miller with literary tastes, loses and finds his little niece, whose death seta him free to gratify his ambition. Mr. Barrie takes his hero, first as a reporter, to an English provincial town,
to which he gives the name of Silchester, and then to London, where he develops in an absurdly farcial fashion into a leader- writer for a daily newspaper. There is an air of reality about Mr. Barrie's newspaper-interiors, although he need not have given Angus's editor the hideous name of " Licquorish." Of course Angus falls in love; but Mr. Barrie is obviously not strong in what is coming very significantly to be known as "the girl department" of fiction. Mr. Barrie does his best with his heroine, Mary Abinger —the best of a clever man who observes closely—but she is not
nearly so real as her peppery and yet warm-hearted father. When a Man's Single is full of drolleries and surprises, alike in dialogue and in action ; but a perusal of it leaves us quite uncertain as to whether its author has the making of a novelist in him.
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